No National Science Foundation ‘utopia’ for Lamar Smith

Texas Republican Lamar Smith is pushing to cut funding for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) budget for social and behavioral research, questioning the agency’s past spending on a “climate change musical” and research on oppression and mental health in Nepal.

Smith, chairman of the U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, said Thursday he is filing an amendment that “zeroes out” the Obama administration’s planned $15 million budget increase for the agency’s Social/Behavioral/Economic (SBE) Research Directorate.

“The SBE Directorate has funded too many questionable grants,” he said in a statement. “For example, when the NSF pays a researcher more than $227,000 to thumb through pictures of animals in old National Geographic magazines, taxpayers feel as though the NSF is thumbing its nose at them.”

Smith also singled out projects looking at tort law and slavery in colonial Peru, and regulation of China’s dairy industry.

Smith’s amendment, co-sponsored by Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, is aimed at the agency’s 2015 funding levels. It would shift the funds to research in physical sciences, biology, computer science, math and engineering.

Smith noted that while the climate change musical he cited (“The Great Immensity”) was not funded by the SBE directorate, it represents a pattern of questionable NSF spending, including what he described as a $4 million grant “for college students to imagine a utopian future in which everyone is forced to give up eating meat and ride bicycles, while the courts re-distribute property to achieve economic equality.”